Elon Musk says Russian hackers are ‘ramping up efforts’ to hack Starlink amid Ukraine war

Elon Musk has revealed that his team has been successful in resisting hacking and jamming attempts of the Starlink satellites by Russian hackers but cautioned that they are "ramping up their efforts". Starlink is Musk's satellite internet company and it was activated in Ukraine after Russia crippled the country's communication systems following an invasion on February 24. Following the communication blackout in Ukraine, Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedovor called out Musk on Twitter for activating the Starlink services.

On May 10, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken revealed in a statement that Russia launched a massive cyberattack earlier, which disabled tens of thousands of terminals outside of Ukraine that supported wind turbines and provide internet services to citizens. In a tweet by Blinken, he said that Russia's cyberattacks are "key pieces" of its war against Ukraine irrespective of how invisible they seem. 

However, Starlink has remained resistant to the Russian cyberattacks and is currently the only non-Russian communications system active in Ukraine. This comes after Musk had warned of potential hacking attempts by Russia owing to the same reason. Recently, Fedorov tweeted that Starlink currently has around 1,50,000 daily users in the country and added that the internet services are providing "crucial support for Ukraine's infrastructure and restoring the destroyed territories". 

Impressed with the anti-hacking systems, the Starlink engineers also won praises from the Pentagon which even admitted that the US military needs to have the same "agility".

US exposes Russia's cybercrimes

In a statement released by Blinken, he, on behalf of America's allies, condemned Russia’s "destructive cyber activities against Ukraine" and revealed the cybercrimes committed by Moscow. According to the Department of Defense statement, it was revealed that Ukraine experienced a series of cyber operations such as "website defacements, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and cyber-attacks to delete data from computers belonging to government and private entities". 

Notably, the US alleges that these cyberattacks were executed by Russia in January 2022, which is weeks before Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a 'military operation' on Kyiv. Vowing to uphold the rules-based international order in cyberspace, the statement said that the US has developed "new mechanisms to help Ukraine identify cyber threats and recover from cyber incidents".